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    The Good Soldier
    The Good Soldier
    The Good Soldier
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Good Soldier

    Written by Ford Madox Ford

    Narrated by Kerry Shale

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Two couples, two marriages; both seemingly perfect, both falling apart. Beneath the surface gentility of the American John Dowell with his wife Florence and the landed grace of Edward and Leonora lie fictions and deceit. There are secret desires, hidden power-games, suicides and madness. Everyone is hiding something; even the narrator can’t be trusted. Brilliantly inventive, tragic and ironic, The Good Soldier is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateFeb 1, 2010
    ISBN9789629549367
    Author

    Ford Madox Ford

    Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were instrumental in the development of early twentieth-century English literature. Today, Ford is best known for The Good Soldier, the Parade’s End Tetralogy, and the Fifth Queen Trilogy.

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    Reviews for The Good Soldier

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    • 5/5
      Wow what a masterpiece. For a slow thoughtful book you never know where it’s going on o turn next.
    • 4/5
      In the beginning this book impresses you with its prose as it lulls you into "the saddest story I have ever heard." The prose at the end of the book is equally good. But what comes in between, well...it speaks of a time and place and perhaps way of life that doesn't exist any more, at least not for those of us who don't immerse ourselves in novels set in the same milieu. Ford's tale of infidelity, jealousy, control, heart disease, insanity, etc. etc. is told out of sequence by its unlikable, untrustworthy narrator, who is know to contradict himself. About 2/3 of the way through, it occurred to me that this was really a very black comedy about a bunch of people who pretty much deserve what they get, and after finishing the book, I'll stick to that point of view. Apparently it is at least somewhat valid based on the Introduction in this Everyman edition. This is a book that will stick with me in some ways, and reading it was mostly a pleasure. But it isn't a great novel.
    • 5/5
      This is one of those books that everyone seems to describe as an under-appreciated classic. Obviously it isn't -- you can hardly open a book on 20th century literature without seeing its praises sung -- but for whatever reason, I hadn't read it before.It's not quite what I was expecting. It comes as a Penguin Modern Classic with cover art by John Singer Sargent, it's written by an American and set mostly in a German spa-town in the years before World War I, the characters are upper middle-class British and New Englanders -- everything is telling you to expect Henry James. And of course there are Jamesian elements: there is a hint of the old "naïve America meets sophisticated Europe" idea, and there is a huge amount of analysis and very little action. However, this is very definitely not James. The language is light and the syntax flows readily at room temperature; ideas are communicated explicitly and directly; there is even the occasional joke.Fundamentally, this seems to be a book about the process of narrative itself. There are only four main characters: the narrator, his wife Florence, Edward Ashburnham (the "Good Soldier"), and Edward's wife Leonora. The sequence of events described is quite short and straightforward, and the narrator goes through them over and over again, each time getting a different, further insight into what happened and how the events relate to the characters and motivations of the people involved. It is made clear to us that it is the process of telling the story that allows him to do this. In other words, the events are defined and redefined by the process of reporting them. Interestingly, this was ten years before Schrödinger and Heisenberg established that the act of measuring a physical system inevitably changes the system. Probably too fanciful to describe this as quantum-literature!Another thing we are made to realise as the successive layers of meaning are pealed away is that there is no externally-verifiable "right answer". We only have the unreliable evidence of the narrator, and he himself has no way to go back and establish that one or other version of events is somehow privileged. The narrator's conclusion that Edward was a good and lovable man and Leonora a selfish and manipulative woman is plausible, but he presents it as his own subjective view. This is clearly a book that has had a big influence on western literature. For instance, I was reminded very strongly of the narrative technique used by Günter Grass in his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, which I read a few months ago. Grass uses exactly this idea, of the influence that fictional narrative has on the events it describes, and of the impossibility of getting back to a single, true, version of events.
    • 4/5
      Published in 1915. It details the interactions of (basically) two couples. I found it often "how on earth could anyone behave in this way" but it was engrossing and gave a picture of life in a time that I have not read about very much before. I can see how the author came to the end provided (a surprise one given the preceding text) but I am pretty sure the way I felt about it and the way he felt about it (given the title) are quite different. I thought it was well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Ford Madox Ford originally intended to call this beautiful but tragic novella "The Saddest Story", based upon the opening sentence, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard"> His publisher objected, suggesting that such a title would have a disastrous impact upon sales. Ford was not convinced, responding angrily that the publisher should do whatever he thought fit, adding that one might as well just call it "The Good Soldier". "The Saddest Story" might have spelt disaster on the booksellers' shelves but it would certainly have satisfied those who lean towards the "It does what it says on the tin" approach to titles. It is an immensely sad story - the tale of two self-destructive couple touring Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.However, it is also a beautifully written story, to such an extent that one suffers all the pain of the narrator as he recounts his tragic story.Ford was a master of literary criticism and brought all his stylistic knowledge to bear here giving a series of different literary devices (flashback, impressionism, florid conjecture). It is a short book but infinitely rewarding .. yet also heartbreaking.
    • 4/5
      A very deep well written novel. A book that sentences have to be read a couple of times to get the full meaning.
    • 4/5
      The way Kerry Shale narrated this book, particularly the little asides almost to himself, is really engaging. The story itself has quite a timeless quality, though it's easy to pick it's not modern literature. It has a feel like The Great Gatsby, in that the narrator seems baffled that the flow of life should buffet about as it does. He relates things without attempting to explain their psychological intricacies, because he cannot understand them himself. Which gives you something to ponder at the end. I like that.
    • 4/5
      Chronic, angst, chronic cardiopulmonary disease, chronic longings, chronic nastiness. Give me Dostoyevsky any day. . Crazy (poor) people are much more interesting than eccentric (rich) people.
    • 5/5
      This is certainly one of the saddest stories I have ever heard. It's as if a slow-motion train wreck were described in exquisitely controlled prose. If you insist on having a conventional plot, a good "read", then this isn't for you. The narrator is sometimes described as 'unreliable' but it's more like he's wearing blinders that occasionally flip open and smack him in the face, stunning him. Imagine a Beethoven sonata composed entirely of slow movements in minor keys -- you listen entranced, but every so often the music gives way to a heart-rending shriek, an outburst of insane laughter, or a series of bitter choking aphorisms before subsiding again into music. It's not fun, but it's a fine work of art.
    • 5/5
      Rated: A-Ford masterfully weaves a sordid narrative tale of intrigue of passion in the empty lives of the rich. This book was one that kept calling me back to fill in more of the blanks in the sad story. Great handling of the various points of view from the leading characters.
    • 5/5
      Ford Madox Ford begins the tale with the words “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” which is a little nervy, I think – kind of like Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate and calling his shot. As if that weren’t enough, FMF “doubles down” in the preface to the version I read, explaining that when offered a chance to make revisions to the text, he decided not to change a word, as he realized the story was perfect the way it was. But d*** if the man doesn’t hit the ball exactly where he pointed. The art of this novel isn’t in the story, which is almost tauntingly simple: an upstanding, well-meaning British officer with a romantic nature that makes him a little bit too susceptible to falling in love ends up inadvertently ruining the lives of his wife (a Catholic who feels unable to divorce him), a good friend (whose wife he succumbs to), and at least two sweetly innocent but emotionally fragile ladies. The art of the novel is a little bit in the characterizations, which are authentic and intricate in a way I associate with Graham Greene, the highest compliment I am capable of giving. With few exceptions, no one in this terribly sad tale is actually evil: indeed, you could make the case that most of them demonstrate the capacity for extreme nobility – Edward, the tale’s tragic swain, is a generous and compassionate landowner; Leonora, his wife, willingly sacrifices her own happiness to secure his; Dowell, the tale’s narrator, similarly sacrifices his needs to accommodate the requirements of his wife’s (supposedly) ill health; Nancy, Edward’s final, fatal femme fatale, is sweet and patient and good. Each, however, additionally possesses a flaw – one tragic, inevitable, Aristotelean little flaw – that ends up perverting their nobility into something corrupt and awful and … yes … terribly sad. As summarized by Dowell (our first person narrator), part-ways through the tale: “I call this the Saddest Story, rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy,” just because … there is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people … drifting down life … causing miseries, hart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.” Mostly, however, the art of this novel is in FMF’s masterly and novel storytelling. The tale is effectively inverted - told from end to beginning - by a narrator who assumes the reader is already familiar with the ending. In this way, FMF crafts a tale that, instead of building towards tragedy, starts with the tragedy already established and then unfolds the details in a way so maddeningly careless that the effect can only have been achieved through the most deliberate and careful writing imaginable. Instead of waiting and watching for tragedy to unfurl – as happens in most novels – tragedy meets us on the first page and accompanies us all the way through our subsequent journey. Which isn’t to suggest this is a miserable or unpleasant read: on the contrary, I would argue that FMF’s wonderfully ingenious storytelling is what makes this “saddest story ever told” not only bearable, but hauntingly human. No short review could ever hope to capture all the worthy intricacies of this work. The title alone deserves its own paragraph: FMF’s introduction raises more questions than it answers about whether “The Good Soldier” is a literal reference to Edward, or meant in a figurative sense as a reference to all folks in this tale of act the role of “good soldier,” selflessly (or selfishly?) sacrificing themselves for the perceived good of others. Another paragraph might be devoted to FMF’s perception of Catholicism, which takes a beating in this tale. Another might be devoted to an analysis of the actual reliability of FMF’s supposed “reliable narrator”; yet another to debating whether, in this novel, FMF has indeed “laid [his] one egg and might as well die.” All of which would make this the ideal novel for a Lit 301 college course, without in any way undermining its merits as captivating and accessible tale, quickly read but not quickly forgotten.
    • 4/5
      An impressionistic work of English life right before the outbreak of WWI. Told in a series of flash-backs, it skips around and is nonchronological. Somewhat difficult to read, but worthwhile. You get different views of the "good" soldier and two Americans, each of whom are married. It has twists. What you believe of a character may turn out not to be true.
    • 5/5
      The Good Soldier is less about what the text says than about what it doesn't.John Dowell is the narrator of this story of two couples (John and Florence Dowell; and Edward and Leonora Ashenburner). He is, allegedly, unaware of the affair between his wife and Edward until after her death, when he relates the story to the reader. How a man could be 1/4 of a close circle of people and remain unaware of their activities stretches credibility; hence, we must come to view John Dowell as an unreliable narrator.The writing is superb and kept me interested in spite of little direct action and almost no dialogue. This is the kind of book that could be read several times, and each time will bring new insights into John's character, and through those insights, to the "truth" of what really happened.
    • 5/5
      The Good Soldier has one of the most famous opening sentences, and the rest of the book lives up to it."This is the saddest story I have ever heard." A tale of passion, miscommunication, good intentions, desperation. Two couples' lives become inextricably entwined in the late 1890s. The writing is restrained, narrated as it is by the deceived husband. He has an utterly believable voice as he drifts back and forth in time, trying to make sense of what has happened. Highly recommended if you're a fan of British literature.
    • 4/5
      This is a tale of infidelity, frustration and disappointment with a famous opening sentence: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard'. There are many ways to read The Good Soldier. I read it for the first time cold, with very little idea about what I was in for. There are annotated editions with a plot synopsis, cast of characters and summaries of recurring themes or motifs but my electronic version was bare of any explanatory Introduction or annotation. Reading it this way was an exploratory process for the narrator, whose first and second names are only revealed incidentally, well into the novel, is unreliable, ignorant much of the time about what's going on and strangely artless. The chronology is fractured. On first reading the novel resembles a random patchwork quilt or William Burroughs cut up. My Kindle copy of the first version I read is heavily annotated with baffled or occasionally derisory comments. It would have been quite possible, of course, to begin with one of the annotated versions and commence reading with knowledge of what to expect. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't. The Good Soldier is a book to be read several or more times and something significant in my appreciation of the book would have been lost if I had been better prepared for that first encounter. The narrator may be strangely artless in the way he frames his narrative, but Ford Madox Ford is very far from artless. The Good Soldier is ranked by some critics among the most important 20th century novels, in company with Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, &c. It is certainly possible to disagree with that ranking. One difference is immediately apparent: the prose of The Good Soldier - the surface of the novel - is generally undistinguished. This is a tale told by a blandly imperceptive man whose mind mostly moves in cliches. He is, of course, Ford's creature and the art of the novel lies in the author's deployment of his unreliable narrator, with all his inadequacies of perception and expressiveness, over the shifting terrain of his 'saddest story'.
    • 1/5
      Thinking this was another book ruined for me by being required reading in school, I had another go at it as an adult. Yuck. Boring.
    • 5/5
      all i ever hear about this book is that it's a fantastic example of an unreliable narrator (which is true). they don't tell you how this is the most heartbreaking and hilarious novel ever written. and so decadent! a must-read.
    • 5/5
      Best audio version of this book. Conveys the affinities and dissonances between English and American sensibiliies.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about ambiguity. Is it a tragedy or a comedy, or even a tragicomedy? Can we trust the narrator - the eponymous, personality-less John Dowell? Does he believe in what he's telling us, or is he trying to convince himself as much as us? Reflecting on his marriage to Florence Dowell and their friendship with the Ashburnhams, Dowell claims to be unaware of his wife's affair with Edward Ashburnham. As he attempts to peel back the layers of truth and fiction which make up his life, there is much which remains unsatisfactory and unresolved. If he is unaware of his wife's affair, he is beyond gullible. If he felt no pain upon enlightenment, he is either completely unfeeling or unwilling to admit it. His persistent reference to 'poor dear' Florence and his determination to justify the 'good' Edward would seem to suggest he has adopted self-delusion and denial as bulwarks against truth and 'reality'. In 'The Good Soldier' silence tells us more than words, and the relationship between truth and fiction is laid bare. In narrating his life, Dowell attempts to control it; imposing his own version of 'truth' over that which has been decided for him. The novel is structured as an imagined a conversation between Dowell and the 'silent listener'; in other words, the narrative leaps around like a frog on hot coals, telling us more about Dowell's state of mind than about the tangled plot which enveloped him. Ultimately, Ford lets us draw our own conclusions, leaving us with a sense that we have only a glimpse of a much, much larger picture.
    • 4/5
      Reread this for a book group, which had a very lively discussion about the unlikability of the characters and the confusing character of the narrator and style of narration. The narrator is so passive he almost defines the term. And he is recalling events in an almost stream of consciousness manner, with constant time shifts as more and more is revealed. Or is it? His lack of insight is what drives the narrative as the reader is forced to construct what really happens from inferences and surmises, mostly revealed through other characters' comments as the narrator recalls and reports them. A fascinating look at early experimentation in narratorial technique by one of the outstanding authors of the time, a man who knew all the major writers and encouraged them in their (better known) work. He was especially close to Joseph Conrad, and the similarities in style are fascinating.
    • 3/5
      Kind of like watching acid eat into a nice painting- slow, sometimes pleasurably excruciating (look! it's spreading to her eyes!), sometimes just dull. I admit I read this because I felt that I ought to, which isn't usually the best basis for reading a book. Sometimes it works out well, of course, but not so much with this. The third quarter was amazing, and made it worth while, but the first third in particular was a bit of a drag. Like Conrad writing a James novel, except instead of slightly unreliable, anachronistic narrative, it's completely unreliable and there's zero 'progression' of any kind. It reminded me a bit of Catch 22 in that way, except not funny. I suspect this would be great fun to study, too... but for night-time edification I'll stick to Conrad writing Conrad novels and James writing James.
    • 5/5
      Let the author and you trust each other, each to his job. Don't worry if at the start you ask, "Who is speaking here?" By the end, after all hope is gone and your heart is broken, you'll know.
    • 1/5
      2nd attempt to take this on, and got to the end by force of will. Still not sure if I hate it or just bored by it. Broken time-line and few major "events" make it hard to get to grips with. More importantly, the characters are all well-lined upper-class types who do nothing. Money is readily available (millions) but referred to with sublime indifference. Much jealousy and rivalry and breaking of relationships, an occasional reference to 'emerging from the bedroom' but no sensuality, no sex, no passion - in fact very little physical or visual detail. Seems to be about feelings but much of that is about having no feelings. Much about what is 'correct' or 'normal', with a curled lip, raised eyebrow sort of way, and quite a few reference to the differences between Catholic and Protestant views of the relations between the sexes. So, who the heck cares? And how come this is seen as a classic?
    • 4/5
      Two rich couples travel together in Europe, they have secret affairs, practice marital deception on a grand scale and two end up dead in strange circumstanes.Clever witty and fun.
    • 3/5
      Very Edwardian Eng Lit
    • 4/5
      ”This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”So begins the 1915 novel by Ford Maddox Ford, a book that even he, ten years after its publication, was surprised by the combined intricacies of voice and non-linear construction that make this narrative confusing and just a bit odd. But dang, it seems to have left me considering a reread in the not too distant future.The story itself is fairly straightforward: two wealthy couples, one English (Edward and Leonora Ashburnham), one American (John and Florence Dowell), spend many seemingly happy years together after meeting in a German spa town. At some point, it is revealed that Edward and Florence have carried on a long affair which Lenora knows about but Dowell does not. This affair appears to be the vehicle for a bleak string of deaths, suicides, and one woman’s spiral into mental illness.To say that Dowell is an unreliable narrator would be true but it is not the whole story. He has been duped so he doesn’t really know the whole story but as he pieces it together it goes through several revisions as he tells the story from several different points of view through time, shifting back and forth through many years. This was all very daring and cutting edge in 1915 but also very jumbled and had me scratching my head wondering where the clarity would come from. The clarity does come eventually, and then you think the narrative is finished but wait, Ford throws in the explanation for one last suicide. Dowell’s narration has always been a matter of controversy and for good reason. It’s random, chaotic, sprawling and for the most part, he is looking for sympathy. He actually admires Edward, who carried on with Dowell’s wife for years, right under his nose. ”I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham---and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance.” (Page 257)Huh. That is brilliant. The fact that a reader can be taken in by such a narrator, well, you just have to give a lot of credit to the author. But wait---does he just think I’m incredibly stupid? Whatever the answer is, I am going to have to read this book again in the not too distant future. And that must mean Ford’s a genius.
    • 4/5
      Written in 1914, with the title The Good Soldier you'd be forgiven for expecting this classic to be a war novel. However, the nearest we come to notions of war in this novel are those of the domestic strife kind concerning two couples who Ford refers to as "good people".Ford Maddox Ford was an interesting character. Rubbing shoulders with the literary greats of the time, he co-wrote several novels with Joseph Conrad (touchy subject - Conrad got all of the credit from the publishers), published works in The English Review (which he founded) by the likes of Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Conrad, Ezra Pound and Yeats, and in Paris published work by Hemingway, Joyce, Jean Rhys and Gertrude Stein in The Transatlantic Review. Despite prolifically writing his own memoirs, poetry, novels and critical essays, Ford was ultimately left disappointed and disillusioned that so many of his writing contemporaries, whose work he had championed as a publisher, left him in their wake with their much greater literary successes.That being said, so much about this book fascinated me, despite at times befuddling me. In the introduction (written post it's original publication), Ford claims it was his best book, and I think it deserves to be remembered alongside the much better known publications of the era from his contemporaries. He insists that the book was in his head for 10 years, but as it was about personal friends he had to wait until they'd passed before being able to tell their story. Knowing as we do his own backstory of extra-marital affairs, one suspects that you might not have too look too far to find where his "friend" inspiration came from.Originally Ford wished the novel to be called The Saddest Story before his publishers put their foot down, given the already sad enough reality of being a country at war. This theme plays out throughout the novel as the narrator reflects on the wasteful tragedy of the spiralling events that take place, and the sadness of a story where none of the characters ultimately find happiness.The Good Soldier has been both criticised and revered for the manner in which it is narrated, a chronological hotch-potch that skips back and forth and round and round rather than being a linear retelling. Although I had to check back every now and then to make sure I hadn't missed something important, I'm definitely in the 'it works' camp. The narration style creates complex layers which definitely make you work as a reader, piecing together disjointed narrative which segues and digresses between what was known at the time and what was discovered later by the narrator to be true. However, in making sense of the story as you read it takes you on what feels like quite a literary journey, and when I reached the end and the last piece of the puzzle slipped into place it felt like I'd just experienced a pretty fine novel.4 stars - I doubt that this will be my favourite novel of the year, but it was a good read nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      "The Good Soldier" follows two well-to-do couples, John (the narrator) and Florence Dowell and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham through the course of their relationships, especially Edward's endless philandering with any woman who will submit to his relentless sexual advances. The story, told long after the events have actually transpired, details Dowell's conversion from innocent onlooker in the four-way friendship into a man whose world has been turned upside down by the discovery that his wife has tried to seduce his best friend. Even then, Dowell chalks up Ashburnham's dalliances to mere "sentimentalism," a need to paternalistically place himself in a situation where he is seen as the selfless hero, as the "good soldier." While Dowell is sometimes more than fair with Ashburnham, at times he relentlessly mocks him, commenting on his stupid expressions and his petit bourgeois concern with "keeping up appearances," even in the face of a sham of a marriage. Ford seems to be looking for answers to explain such behavior, but doesn't even seem convinced by his own dubious explanations.Marked by a radical break with the earlier, traditional Victorian novel, "The Good Soldier" is highly evocative of the society novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and even some D. H. Lawrence. Adultery is discussed frankly and directly, and instead of the morally certain, honest, objective narration that we see in work before it, Ford's narrator is bereft when he finds his search for meaning and simplicity an empty one, finding in its place an ambiguous and unreliable world. This is a hard pill to swallow for those who have been weaned on Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Its subtlety and sensitive psychological representations mirror the complexities of people, not stock characters.One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is how utterly conflicted Dowell remains throughout the novel. The authority of his narrative voice waxes and wanes (mostly wanes) through the entire story, which might be frustrating for some readers, but was a welcome relief for me. Concomitant with this voice is an overall ambiance of moral turpitude and decadence, and not simply as a result of Florence and Ashburnham's affair. Dowell is never slow to remind the reader that he knows little, that he might be wrong, that this was only the way things seemed to him. It is hardly a surprise that Ford, who considered himself an "impressionist," has very much up to the name and written a novel of fleeting impressions and reminiscences which always fall short of cohering into a unified story whose characters motivations are convincingly delineated.One of the results of Ford's technique is that it breaks with one's usual response after having completed a novel: since Aristotle, we have come to find some sort of intellectual catharsis from tragedy, but this is a story that complicates that expectation, even if we are afforded some sort of edification in human moral psychology. The novel was written in 1915, no doubt a perilous time in European history. At the risk of committing an egregious post hoc ergo propter hoc, it may be that Ford's narrative is indicative of a world on the precipice of the Great War, whose social and cultural orders have shifted from firmly hierarchical to nebulous in less than a generation.Even if you do not care for the novel itself, it would be difficult to deny its important place in a canon of works that need to be carefully and thoughtfully read to have a fuller and more appreciative knowledge of twentieth-century English literature. I cherished it, and its characters seemed like some of the most artfully drawn I've ever read. Weeks after having finished the novel, the various tête-à-têtes and interrelationships continue to dance through my head while I imagine sitting down next to Dowell while he tells me his story.
    • 4/5
      Writing in the literary appropriation of impressionism pioneered by his erstwhile friend Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford’s modernist narrative is an enemy of structure and coherence as it mimics his American narrator Dowell’s memory of his obsessive psycho-sexual relationships with his suicidal wife Florence, British stick Edward and his wife Leonora, chronology rolling in on itself over and again. When, at beginning of its fourth part, Dowell apologises for having told the story “in a very rambling way” because “it may be difficult for anyone to find their way through what may be a sort of maze”, well, reader, I sighed. Yet this is still engrossing thanks to its thick atmosphere steeped in turn of the last century continental privilege, and some beautifully rendered characterisation, especially Leonora, a passive aggressive viper who can ruin a man by simply giving him some of her attention. And knows it. And does.
    • 3/5
      I'm so conflicted on what I really think of this book. It was a struggle to get through and at times I wanted to throw it against the wall, but in the end I powered through and felt satisfied with its conclusion. This to me balances out to "average"!